Conversation Intelligence: Your New Outsourced Sales Development Tool

Our co-founders, David Stillman and Steve Richard, are no strangers to outsourced sales development. Before entering the SalesTech world, they built a best-in-class outsourced appointment setting firm, Vorsight. How have they remained best-in-class? Much of it is due in part to conversation intelligence technology, like ExecVision.

What is Conversation Intelligence Software?

Conversation intelligence software ingests, analyzes, and transcribes call recordings to provide actionable data. This data can be used for coaching, training and onboarding, better understanding deals in the pipeline, and identifying what is and isn’t working on calls.

Outsourced Sales Development & Conversation Intelligence Technology

All sales teams face similar challenges. For outsourced sales development teams and their clients, those challenges are amplified. For instance, it’s not like an account executive can walk over to the SDRs desk to get more information about a prospect.

One universal challenge across the industry is ensuring accurate CRM data and meaningful call notes. When the data is incorrect or the notes gloss over a key buying signal, your salespeople lose valuable information that they could be using to close the deal. It’s especially important for outsourced appointment setting teams to take accurate notes and keep the CRM fully up-to-date to ensure smooth handoffs to their clients.

The easiest way to overcome these challenges is two-fold: record your sales calls, and leverage outsourced sales solutions like conversation analysis software.

By housing your call recordings in a conversation intelligence platform, you enable reps to replay their calls on demand. Reps can revisit conversations to capture additional notes and CRM data. This allows reps to focus more on conversations during live calls instead of scrambling to take notes.

Outsourced sales development requires a level of transparency with clients. Conversation intelligence software allows outsourced teams to provide an unseen level of transparency with their clients–if they choose to. Teams can choose to share entire calls or snippets of conversations such as those that contain highly resonating pain points. Kickoff calls can be reviewed to ensure reports and QBRs are tailored to the client’s highest priorities.

Conversation intelligence software also has the ability to make reps better and drive more revenue.

Driving Behavior Change with Sales Development Training

The only way to drive behavior change in your sales team is through consistent coaching and rep self-awareness. Outsourced appointment setting firms especially need to build a coaching culture because:

Reps are generally in seat for shorter amounts of time

There is generally more rapid career advancement through the career path with more frequent promotions

Time to onboard new reps is a cost that can kill the business, so quick time to productivity is everything

In outsourced sales development, you need to ramp up reps on new clients and new campaigns, representing another critical “onboarding” cost - so skill development is even more important than non-outsourced sales orgs

Reps usually don’t know if the meetings they book lead to closed deals making a coaching culture a more important piece of morale building

Driving Rep Performance with Call Intelligence Technology

If you’re outsourcing sales development, would you pick a firm that doesn’t coach their reps? Every sales team deserves to be coached, but it is especially important for outsourced teams. Consider this:

How can they replicate success at scale if they’re not sure what works and what doesn’t?

How can they consistently serve your sales team with leads and opportunities if they don’t know what their reps are saying on the phone?

These challenges can easily be amplified due to the business relationship. For example, AEs may be quick to blame the SDRs for poor lead quality or bad notes. Marketing departments can find themselves in the dark on whether or not messaging is effective. Without accountability, discussions between teams can quickly become a game a telephone and finger pointing.

Call intelligence software helps alleviate these challenges by providing the highest level visibility into the call, second only to being on the call yourself. This is incredibly valuable for customer satisfaction in outsourced sales development. CSMs can utilize call and highlight sharing so clients can hear exactly what’s being said on calls. This has multiple applications from hand-offs to analyzing lead quality and more.